The Sportswriter

by Richard Ford

“I like your new hair,” I say. The new way was a thatch along the back that is very becoming. We are past the end of things now, but I don’t want to leave.

  X fingers a strand, pulls it straight away from her head and cuts her eyes over at it. “It’s dikey, don’t you think?”

  “No.” And indeed I don’t.

  “Well. It’d gotten to a funny length. I had to do something. They screamed at home when they saw it.” She smiles as if she’s realized this moment that children become our parents, and we just become children again. “You don’t feel old, do you, Frank?” She turns and stares away across the cemetery. “I don’t know why I’ve got all these shitty questions. I feel old today. I’m sure it’s because you’re going to be thirty-nine.”

  The black man has come to the corner of Constitution Street and stands waiting as the traffic light flicks from red to green across from the new library. The appliance truck is gone, and a yellow minibus stops and lets black maids out onto the same corner. They are large women in white, tentish maid-dresses, talking and swinging big banger purses, waiting for their white ladies to come and pick them up. The man and women do not speak. “Oh, isn’t that the saddest thing you ever saw,” X says, staring at the women. “Something about that breaks my heart. I don’t know why.”

  “I really don’t feel a bit old,” I say, happy to be able to answer a question honestly, and possibly slip in some good advice on the side. “I have to wash my hair a little more often. And sometimes I wake up and my heart’s pounding to beat the band—though Fincher Barksdale says it isn’t anything to worry about. I think it’s a good sign. I’d say it was some kind of urgency, wouldn’t you?”

  X stares at the maids who are talking in a group of five, watching up the street where their rides will come from. Since our divorce she has developed the capability of complete distraction. She will be talking to you but be a thousand miles away. “You’re very adaptable,” she says airily.

  “I am. I know you don’t have a sleeping porch in your house, but you should try sleeping with all your windows open and your clothes on. When you wake up, you’re ready to go. I’ve been doing it for a while now.”

  X smiles at me again with a tight-lipped smile of condescension, a smile I don’t like. We are not Hansel and Gretel anymore. “Do you still see your palmist, what’s-her-name?”

  “Mrs. Miller. No, less often.” I’m not about to admit I tried to see her last night.

  “Do you feel like you’re at the point of understanding everything that’s happened—to us and our life?”

  “Sometimes. Today I feel pretty normal about Ralph. It doesn’t seem like it’s going to make me crazy again.”

  “You know,” X says, looking away. “Last night I lay in bed and thought bats were flying around my room, and when I closed my eyes I just saw a horizon line a long way off, with everything empty and flat like a long dinner table set for one. Isn’t that awful?” She shakes her head. “Maybe I should lead a life more like yours.”

  A small resentment rises in me, though this is not the place for resentment. X’s view of my life is that it is a jollier, more close to the grain business than hers, and certainly more that way than I know it to be. She’d probably like to tell me again that I should’ve gone ahead and written a novel instead of quitting and being a sportswriter, and that she should’ve done some things differently herself. But that would not be right, at least about me—there were even plenty of times when she thought so herself. Everything looks old gloomy to her now. One strain in her character that our divorce has touched is that she is possibly less resilient than she has been before in her life, and worry about getting older is proof of it. I’d cheer her up if I could, but that is one of the talents I lost a long time ago.

  “I’m sorry again,” she says. “I’m just feeling blue today. There’s something about your going away that makes me feel like you’re leaving for a new life and I’m not.”

  “I hope I am,” I say, “though I doubt it. I hope you are.” Nothing, in fact, would I like better than to have a whole new colorful world open up to me today, though I like things pretty well as they are. I will settle for a nice room at the Pontchartrain, a steak Diane and a salad bar in the rotating rooftop restaurant, seeing the Tigers under the lights. I am not hard to make happy.

  “Do you ever wish you were younger?” X says moodily.

  “No. I’m fairly happy this way.”

  “I wish it all the time,” she says. “That seems stupid, I know.”

  I have nothing I can say to this.

  “You’re an optimist, Frank.”

  “I hope I am.” I smile a good yeoman’s smile at her.

  “Sure, sure,” she says, and turns away from me and begins making her way quickly out through the tombstones, her head up toward the white sky, her hands deep in her pockets like any midwestern girl who’s run out of luck for the moment but will soon be back as good as new. I hear the bells of St. Leo the Great chime six o’clock, and for some reason I have a feeling I won’t see her for a long time, that something is over and something begun, though I cannot tell you for the life of me what those somethings might be.

  2

  All we really want is to get to the point where the past can explain nothing about us and we can get on with life. Whose history can ever reveal very much? In my view Americans put too much emphasis on their pasts as a way of defining themselves, which can be death-dealing. I know I’m always heartsick in novels (sometimes I skip these parts altogether; sometimes I close the book and never pick it up again) when the novelist makes his clanking, obligatory trip into the Davy Jones locker of the past. Most pasts, let’s face it, aren’t very dramatic subjects, and should be just uninteresting enough to release you the instant you’re ready (though it’s true that when we get to that moment we are often scared to death, feel naked as snakes and have nothing to say).

  My own history I think of as a postcard with changing scenes on one side but no particular or memorable messages on the back. You can get detached from your beginnings, as we all know, and not by any malevolent designs, just by life itself, fate, the tug of the ever-present. The stamp of our parents on us and of the past in general is, to my mind, overworked, since at some point we are whole and by ourselves upon the earth, and there is nothing that can change that for better or worse, and so we might as well think about something more promising.

  I was born into an ordinary, modern existence in 1945, an only child to decent parents of no irregular point of view, no particular sense of their place in history’s continuum, just two people afloat on the world and expectant like most others in time, without a daunting conviction about their own consequence. This seems like a fine lineage to me still.

  My parents were rural Iowans who left farms near the town of Keota and moved around a lot as young marrieds, settling finally in Biloxi, Mississippi, where my father had some work that involved plating ships with steel at the Ingalls ship-building company, for the Navy, which he’d served in during the war. The year before that they had been in Cicero, doing what I’m not really sure. The year before that in El Reno, Oklahoma, and before that near Davenport, where my father had something to do with the railroad. I’m frankly hazy about his work, though I have enough memory of him: a tall rangy blade-faced man with pale eyes—like me—but with romantically curly hair. I have tried to place him in a Davenport or a Cicero, where I’ve gone myself to report sports events. But the effect is strange. He was not a man—at least in my memory—for those places.

  I remember my father played golf and sometimes I went with him around the flat course on hot days in the Biloxi summer. He played on the Air Force Base links which were tanned and bleached out and frequented by non-coms. This was so my mother could have a day to herself and go to the movies or get her hair fixed or stay home reading movie magazines and cheap novels. Golf seemed to me then the saddest kind of torture, and even my poor father didn’t seem to have much fun at it. He was not rea
lly the golf type, but more the type to race cars, and he took it up, I believe, in a mindful way because it meant something to him, some measure of success in the world. I remember standing on a tee with him, both of us wearing shorts, looking down the long palm-lined fairway beyond which you could see a sea wall and the Gulf, and seeing him grimace toward the faraway flag as if it represented a fortress he was reluctantly about to lay seige to, and him saying to me, “Well, Franky, do you think I can hit it that far?” And my saying, “I doubt it.” He was sweating and smoking a cigarette in the heat, and I have a very clear memory of him looking at me then as if in wonder. Who was I again? What was it I was planning? He seemed struck by such questions. It was not exactly a heartless look, just a look of profoundest wonder and resign.

  My father died when I was fourteen, and after that my mother placed me in what she called “the naval academy,” which was in fact a little military school near Gulfport called Gulf Pines (we cadets called it Lonesome Pines) and where I never once minded being. In fact, I liked the military bearing that was required there, and I think there is an upright part of my character which at least respects the appearance of rectitude if not the fact, and which school was responsible for. My situation at Lonesome Pines was somewhat more than average, since most of the cadets had come there from the broken homes of rich people or from abandonment, or because they had stolen something or burned something down and their families were able to get them off and sent there instead of reform school. Though the other students never seemed any different from me, just boys full of secrecy and not-knowing and abject longing, who thought of this time as something simply to be gotten through, so that no one made attachments. It was as if we all sensed we’d be gone someday soon in a sudden instant—often it happened in the middle of the night—and didn’t want to get involved. Or else it was that none of us wanted to know anybody later on who was the way we were now.

  What I remember of the place was a hot parade grounds surrounded by sparse pine trees, a flag pole with an anchor at its base, a stale shallow lake where I learned to sail, a smelly beach and boat house, hot brown stucco classroom buildings and white barracks houses that reeked with mops. There were some ex-Navy warrant officers who taught there—men unsuited for regular teaching. One Negro even taught there, a man named Bud Simmons who coached baseball. The Commandant was an old captain from World War I, named Admiral Legier.

  We took our leaves in bunches, out on Highway 1 in the little Gulf Coast towns we could get to by public bus, in the air-conditioned movie and tamale houses, or hanging out in the vicinity of Keesler Air Force Base, in the hot, sandy parking lots of strip joints, all of us in our brown uniforms trying to get the real servicemen to buy us booze, and wretched because we were too young to go in ourselves and had too little money to be able to do anything but squander it.

  I went home on holidays to my mother’s bungalow in Biloxi, and occasionally I saw her brother Ted who lived not far away, and who came to see me and took me on trips to Mobile and Pensacola, where we did not do much talking. It may be just the fate of boys whose fathers die young never to be young—officially—ourselves; youth being just a brief dream, a prelude of no particular lasting moment before actual life begins.

  My only personal athletic experience came there at Lonesome Pines. I tried to play baseball on the school team, under Bud Simmons, the Negro coach. I was relatively tall for my age—though I’m more normal now—and I had the lanky, long-loose-arm grace of a natural ball player. But I could never do it well. I could always see myself as though from outside, doing the things I was told to do. And that was enough never to do them well or fully. An inbred irony seemed to haunt me, and served no useful purpose but to make me a musing, wiseacre kid, shifty-eyed and secretive—the kind who belongs in exactly such a place as Lonesome Pines. Bud Simmons did what he could with me, including make me throw with my other arm, which I happily did, though it didn’t help at all. He referred to my problem as not being able to “give it up,” and I knew exactly what he meant. (Today I am amazed when I find athletes who can be full-fledged people and also “give it up” to their sport. That does not happen often, and it is a dear gift from a complex God.)

  I did not see so much of my mother in those years. Nor does this seem exceptional to me. It must’ve happened to thousands of us B. 1945s, and to children in earlier centuries as well. It seems odder that children see their parents so much these days, and come to know them better than they probably ever need to. I saw my mother when she could see me. I stayed in her house when I was back from school and we acted like friends. She loved me as much as she was able to, given her altered situation. She might’ve liked having a closer life with me. I’m sure I would’ve liked it. But it’s possible she was dreamy herself and in no particular mind to know exactly what to do. I’m sure she never thought my father would die, in the same way I didn’t think Ralph would die, except he did. She was only thirty-four, a small dark-eyed woman with skin darker than mine, and who strikes me now as having been shocked by how far she had come from where she was born, and having been more absorbed by that than anything. Her life just distracted her the way another person would, not in a hateful or a selfish way, possibly even the way my father had, but that I knew nothing about. I think she must’ve been worried about going back to Iowa, and didn’t want to.

  Eventually she went to work in a large hotel called the Buena Vista in Mississippi City as the night cashier, and while she was there she met a man named Jake Ornstein, a jeweler from Chicago, and after a few months in which he made several trips down, she married him and moved to Skokie, Illinois, where she lived until she got cancer and died.

  At almost that same time I won an NROTC scholarship through Lonesome Pines, and by pure chance enrolled at the University of Michigan. The Navy’s idea was to achieve a mix, and nobody got to go where they wanted to go, though I don’t even remember where I wanted to go, except it probably wasn’t there.

  I do remember that there were times when I visited my mother in Skokie, taking the fragrant old New York Central from Ann Arbor and spending the weekend lounging around trying to be comfortable and make conversation in that strangely suburban ranch-style house with plastic slipcovers on the furniture and twenty-five clocks on the walls, in a Jewish neighborhood and in a town where I had no attachments. Jake Ornstein was fifteen years older than my mother and was quite a nice fellow, and I got along well with him and his son Irv—better, in fact, than I ended up getting along with my mother. She mentioned she thought my college was “one of the good schools,” but treated me like a nephew she didn’t know very well, and who worried her, even though she liked me. (She gave me a smoking jacket and pipe when I left for school—she was already in Skokie by then so that my leaving was from there.) For my part I’m sure I stared a lot and kept a distance. I’m sure we both tried to approach one another on some new level that could’ve flattered us both when we saw how we’d adjusted. But her life had gotten in front of her somehow, and I became someone out of another time, a fact I don’t hold against my mother and haven’t felt abandoned or disaffected because of it.

  What could her life have been like, after all? Good, bad, both by turns? A long pathway through which she hoped to be not too unhappy? She knew. But only she knew. And I am not prone to judge a life I don’t know much about, in particular since things have turned out all right for me. The best I knew then, and still, is of my own life, which at the time my mother was married to Jake Ornstein, I was on fire to get on with. I know that she and Jake were happy, and that I loved my mother very much in whatever way I was able, knowing so little about her. When she died I was still in school. I went to the funeral, acted as a pallbearer, sat around Jake’s house for a weekend afternoon with the people they both knew, tried to think of what my parents had taught me in their lives (I came up with “a sense of independence”). And that night I got back on the train and slipped out of that life for good. Jake, afterwards, moved to Phoenix, married agai
n, and died of cancer himself. Irv and I kept in touch for a few years, but have drifted apart.

  But does that seem like an odd life? Does it seem strange that I do not have a long and storied family history? Or a list of problems and hatreds to brood about—a bill of particular grievances and nostalgias that pretend to explain or trouble everything? Possibly I was born into a different time. But maybe my way is better all around, and is actually the way with most of us and the rest tell lies.

  Still. Do I ever wonder what my family would think of me? Of my profession? As a divorced man, a father, a quester after women? As an adult heading for life and death?

  Sometimes. Though it never stays with me long. And, indeed, when I think of it, I think this: that they would probably have approved of everything I’ve done—particularly my decision to quit writing and get on to something they would think of as more practical. They would feel about it the way I do: that things sometimes happen for the best. Thinking that way has given me a chance for an interesting if not particularly simple adulthood.

  By 9:30 I have nearly finished the few odds-and-ends details remaining before picking up Vicki and heading for the airport. Usually this would include a cup of coffee with Bosobolo, my boarder from the seminary in town, a custom I enjoy, but not today. We have had some good give-and-takes on such subjects as whether the bliss of the redeemed is heightened by the sufferings of the damned—something he feels Catholic about, but I don’t. He is forty-two and from the country of Gabon, and a stern-faced apologist for limitless faith. I usually argue for works, but without any illusions about where it’ll get me.

  Why take a boarder? To ward off awful loneliness. Why else? The consolation in the disinterested footfalls of another human in an otherwise empty house, especially a six-foot-five-inch Negro from Africa living in your attic, can be considerable. This morning, though, he is away early on his own business and I see him from the window larruping up Hoving Road like a Bible salesman, heading for school—white shirt, black trousers and truck-tread sandals. He has told me that he is a prince in his tribe—the Nwambes—but I have never known an African who wasn’t. Like me, he has a wife and two children. We’re both Presbyterians, though I am not a good one.